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The manuscript is heavily damaged and fragmented. The papyrus was bound in a codex, which may have consisted of 220 pages, however only 30 survive (two of Matthew, six of Mark, seven of Luke, two of John, and 13 of Acts). All of the pages have lacunae, with very few lines complete. The leaves of Matthew and John are the smallest. The original pages were roughly 10 inches by 8 inches. Unlike many of the other surviving manuscripts from the 3rd century which usually contained just the Gospels, or just the Catholic letters, or just the Pauline epistles, this manuscript possibly contained more than one grouping of New Testament texts. This hypothesis is attributed to the use of gatherings of two leaves, a single-quire that most other codices had.[4]

Because of the extent of the damage, determining the text's type has been difficult for scholars. The manuscript was obtained by Alfred Chester Beatty in the first half of the 20th century, and published in The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, Descriptions and Texts of Twelve Manuscripts on Papyrus of the Greek Bible by Frederic G. Kenyon in 1933. In this work, Kenyon identified the text of the Gospel of Mark in P45 as Caesarean, following the definition of Burnett Hillman Streeter.[5] Hollis Huston criticized Kenyon's transcription of various partially surviving words, and concluded that chapters 6 and 11 of Mark in 45 could not neatly fit into one text-type, especially not Caesarean, because the manuscript predates the distinctive texts for each type from the 4th and 5th centuries.[6]

45 has a relatively close statistical relationship with Codex Washingtonianus in Mark, however, and to a lesser extent Family 13. Citing Larry Hurtado's study, Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean Text: Codex W in the Gospel of Mark,[8] Eldon Jay Epp has agreed that there is no connection to a Caesarean or pre-Caesarean text in Mark. There is also not a strong connection to the Neutral text of Codex Vaticanus, the Western text of Codex Bezae, and the Byzantine text of the textus receptus.[9] Another hypothesis is that "45 comes from the Alexandrian tradition, but has many readings intended to "improve" the text stylistically, and a number of harmonizations. While still difficult to place historically in a category of texts, most scholars today agree that the text is not Caesarean, contrary to Kenyon.

The textual character of the manuscript varies from book to book. In Mark, multivariate analysis of apparatus data from the UBS Greek New Testament (4th ed.)[10] places 45 in a group which includes W (for chapters 5-16), Θ, Family 1, 28, 205, 565; the Sinaitic Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian versions; and Origen's quotations.[11] This group corresponds to what Streeter called an "Eastern type" of the text.[12] In Luke, an eleven-way PAM partition based on Greek manuscript data associated with the INTF's Parallel Pericopes volume[13] places the manuscript in a group with C (04), L (019), Ξ (040), 33, 892, and 1241.[14] In Acts it is closest to the Alexandrian text.